Thursday 14 March 2013 06.00 EDT
First published on Thursday 14 March 2013 06.00 EDT

Let us leave aside the 1960s for a moment, and acknowledge that for most people who came of age in the UK between the late 1970s and mid 1980s, mention of the word "Mod" should spark at least a few Proustian flashes. There may be memories of a local teenage gang clad in ex-army parkas, or perhaps a recollection of provincial discos always setting aside 15 minutes for a run of songs by the Jam. The more hard-bitten might be transported to the origin of habits that have never left them: the insistence that collars should always be buttoned-down, or a belief that lapels on a jacket must never exceed a certain width. In retrospect, one other thought might occur: that when a London-centred 60s cult was revived circa 1979 and its influence once again rippled through the culture, we saw the decisive stirrings of something now taken for granted – a pop culture that endlessly resurrects and recontextualises the past.

As an adolescent growing up in the far-flung suburbs of Manchester, I was consumed by my first taste of what Mod had left behind, and it changed me for ever: the initial rites included a poleaxed listen to the Who's My Generation (which, even in 1984, sounded like musical gunpowder), my first and only pair of two‑tone tonic trousers, and a dreamed-about trip to Carnaby Street, or what remained of it. But what my friends and I were doing had almost nothing to do with Mod's rarefied beginnings, crisply explained in Jonathon Green's oral history Days in the Life (1988) by the journalist David May. "Mods were always intellectual," he said. And at the start there "was always a large gay element in it. On Saturday afternoon we'd go to get our hair done in the women's hairdressers. Then we'd go out in the evening, dancing … We didn't fight rockers, we were far more interested in some guy's incredible shoes, or his leather coat. But underneath this, one did read Camus. The Outsider: there it was, it explained an awful lot. A sort of Jean Genet criminal lowlife was also important." As a more succinct statement of what it was all about, I have always loved the late Mod pioneer Peter Meaden's famous quote – reproduced on the sleeve of the Who's 1973 Mod-opera Quadrophenia – about "clean living under difficult circumstances".

Uncertainty clouds both Mod's origins, and its legacy. The word was definitely short for "modernist", and initially at least, the face-off between "trad" and "modern" jazz was central to the cult's self-understanding. Up until around 1962, its disciples probably numbered no more than 150, resident in east and north London, and fond of enjoying themselves in Soho, refreshed by such go-faster drugs as Dexedrine and Drinamyl. West End clubs The Scene and The Flamingo were important – as, at various points, were sartorial items including Brooks Brothers shirts and Clark's Desert Boots. But much of the rest is unclear, particularly the almost unfathomable series of coincidences and superficial similarities that may or may not tie together Mod's clandestine beginnings, and scores of later happenings.

In other words, what could possibly link 1980s suburban oiks in Fred Perry shirts to sharply dressed 1960s existentialists? This book, written by an academic, attempts an answer, contending that Mod was not only "the first distinctively British youth culture" but "a popular form of modernism – that stream of creativity in Europe and America that began in the early 20th century as an avant garde reaction to mainstream aesthetics, morality and politics". Its 400-page text goes from the 1950s to the present day, and mentions a sprawling array of people and cultural touchstones: Terence Conran, Mary Quant, the Beatles, Michael Caine, the artist Bridget Riley, David Bowie, 1970s Northern Soul, 1980s football-following "casuals" and more. The book does not convincingly tell the story of the original Mods – to all intents and purposes, the only people worthy of the term – perhaps because its ambitions are much loftier, something embodied in its subtitle's citing of a "very British style".

But such a wide focus – "Perhaps … we are all modernists now," Weight ends up suggesting – creates dire problems when it comes to coherence. There is almost no sense of a story unfolding – instead, Weight opts for a scattershot narrative, brimming with second-hand quotations, a bit like an undergraduate dissertation ("As George Melly recalled … As Dick Hebdige has argued … As the American critic Ted Polhemus explained"). The writing manages to convey roughly what he is getting at: a sensibility whose inspirations fell between mainland Europe and the US, and a drive to transcend class via an attachment to style and what the modern vernacular would call aspiration. But he gets so lost in the big picture that crucial details are almost forgotten. The sole discussion of the Mods v Rockers seaside disturbances that marked the cult's high-water mark of visibility and also the moment at which it lost all connection to its origins totals a few paragraphs, and comes in a chapter on the 1970s. There is a chronic shortage of anecdotes – which, in the case of a phenomenon so driven by remarkable individuals, is a real shame. There are also errors of fact, and interpretation: "AirWair" is not an eight-hole variety of the Doctor Marten boot but the generic brand-name of its air-cushioned sole; if you think the Jam's "Town Called Malice" "celebrated family life", you have probably never heard it.

Plenty of other things are either omitted, or underplayed. Aside from the specifics of jazz, rhythm'n'blues, Italian suits and the rest, what arguably defined pure Mod was a fevered consumerism, whereby what was in or out could change drastically in a matter of weeks. The cult was also almost ludicrously hierarchical, so that an inner circle of "Faces" held themselves to be very different from mere "Tickets" or "Moddy Boys". Small wonder that the most devoted Mods seemed to have no countercultural aspect whatsoever: "A lot of these boys went off and did jobs like bank clerks," one ex-Mod later recalled, "and their managers thought they were fantastic … I used to go to work and I was better dressed than my boss by a long way."

In fact, what gets lost in Weight's rather forced attempt to identify a "modernist" sensibility running through whole swaths of post-60s culture is something much more simple: the idea that the Mods were on the cutting-edge of modern capitalism, trailblazers for the latter-day high street notion of "fast fashion", and that very profitable practice by which companies market themselves via carefully chosen figureheads – and the herd runs off in hot pursuit.

The 14-year-old me would wince at the cynicism of that observation – and he would probably have a point, because it does a disservice to Mod's seductive and magical life‑codes. They probably defy rational explanation, better understood via a clipped electric guitar chord or the fold of a shirt-collar than any text. But to be reductive about it, the Mod ideal boils down not just to a kind of neurotic self‑respect, but an emphasis on sharpness, an attention to detail, and everything being just so. And in that sense, this rambling book is so unlike its subject that it ends up missing its target, by miles.